You will enjoy this week’s App Smart column if you’re detail-obsessed and like to keep track of your possessions, because it is all about home-inventory apps.
Inventory Droid is one more popular full-featured home inventory app for devices using the Android operating system. Like many of its type, it lets you log all the salient details about your items, like brand and price, and you can also associate a photo with the entry. It can read bar codes, which can help you quickly locate an item’s entry in the database.
The app has several extras, like an alert to remind you that you’ve lent an object to someone. It’s even slightly more attractively designed than the average Android app. The main drawback may be the $4.99 price.
If the idea of logging every single item in your home seems like overkill, but you would still like to catalog your extensive and expensive DVD archive, then Movie Collection and Inventory, costing $3.99 on Android, is the app for you. It’s designed to be sraightforward to use, and though it may appear overly simple at first glance it does pack in a lot of features, including the ability to add photos of your DVD boxes, to rate each movie and to log the number of times you’ve watched each one.
The app can also read bar codes, so you can quickly scan a DVD’s bar code and find its entry in the database you’ve created. However, the app is very tightly limited to just creating inventories of your movies.
For Windows Phones, one popular app in this category is HomeCloud. It’s more photo-centric than rival apps, but still lets you log all the various details of your possessions, like serial number and price. The app allows you to back up your archive to Microsoft’s SkyDrive (which may be handy if your smartphone itself is damaged or lost!) and it costs just $1.49. It may not be quite as sophisticated as rival apps on Android or iOS, but it is attractively designed.
These apps may be useful for keeping track of items in your home o! r items you loan to a friend. And if there’s a theft or some other disaster they’ll be handy for an insurance claim. If you’re mainly concerned about logging your library of valuable books or a wardrobe of expensive clothes, a quick search of the app stores show many different options. Give them a whirl and see if they fit your needs.
Quick call
Wahwah is a new free streaming music app in the iTunes App Store that, like other apps of the same type, offers prearranged song selections to match your activities like working in the office or exercising in the gym. But it also includes a very novel social networking trick, which lets you not only see what music your friends are listening to, but lets you listen to the same songs at the same time.
